Just starting to familiarize myself with everything after about a decade at reddit. I understand that you can view content across instances but I’m noticing that both kbin and lemmy have similar (competing?) magazines/communities.
For example @PCGaming and !pcgaming (lemmyworld) but then there is also, @pcgaming, !pcgaming@lemmy.ca, etc.
Do I have to subscribe to all of them? Or are there “official” fediverse communities?
As I said, I’m still trying to figure things out, but subscribing to so many similar communities seems cumbersome for the user and (imo) fragments userbases that are literally talking about the same thing.
Thanks in advance!
You kind of have to think of this differently than you would on reddit. The fragmentation is to an extent the point. Maybe you talked about pcgaming on Reddit, 2 or 3 discords, 4chan, and Steam communities in your daily life already. If you miss out on a conversation in one place, that’s unfortunate but not the end of the world. If its big enough news you’ll see it in another community too.
Here you can talk about gaming in Kbin, Lemmy, Mastadon, Pixelfed etc. As your explore and your network grows, you’ll get it all, possibly in the same feed. And possibly you don’t care for the kbin pcgaming, you unsubscribe from it and perhaps a big strong community forms on Lemmy.world and thats where everyone goes but you’re not subscribed? Someone will boost it your way eventually and you’ll discover it too.
Curating your own feed takes some time and effort. But the beauty of it that it’ll be fully yours.
On reddit I’ve always used my Frontpage which consisted only of my subbed subs. At the beginning I went through r/All for a few hours and subscribed to everything that interested me. Then after a few days I’ve switched to my Frontpage and never looked back. After that I discovered new subreddits through comments. I had several hundred subs at the end.
You don’t have to subscribe to all of them, just subscribe to the ones that give you the vibe you like.
There’s no such thing as “official” communities, because every instance could potentially be the next big thing, and every instance could potentially disappear tomorrow. That’s sort of annoying for people who just want one good community, but it’s one of the strengths of the fediverse. Some people will really like one instance and some people will hate it. Unlike with reddit where there’s only one /r/books, there’s as many as we have instances and people can go where they like and avoid where they hate.
I’m subscribing to all and I’ll just unsubscribe if it turns out I don’t like them. For overlapping ones I haven’t seen many duplicate threads. If I post, though, I’ll stick to one and right now I’m favoring the one on my instance.
